Mars | Signs of Life

Designed initially to explore the Gale crater on Mars as part of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission. NASA’s Curiosity rover was launched from Cape Canaveral on November 26, 2011, and landed inside the Gale crater on Mars on August 6, 2012.

The size of a 4 door family sedan, Curiosity completed a 350 million mile journey when it was less than 1 ½” miles from its targeted touchdown. Curiosity’s objective was to investigate Martian climate and geology and assess if environmental conditions were favorable for microbial life. It would also go on to conduct planetary habitability studies in preparation for human exploration of Mars.

For three Martian years or nearly six years to us on Earth, Curiosity has been examining the air above the Gale crater. Or more specifically the crater’s near-equatorial exploration site. With the aid of its Sample Analysis at Mars or SAM portable chemistry lab, Curiosity can determine not only what the surface-atmosphere is made of, but also how its gases change across seasons.

According to NASA, many of the gases found on Mars “are very well behaved”. However, the SAM experiment returned unexpected results when analyzing one of the gases. To NASA’s surprise, the gas showed the presence of oxygen.

Scientists have long known of the presence of carbon dioxide on Mars, which makes up 95 percent of the planet’s atmosphere. The carbon dioxide freezes out over the poles in winter and sublimates back into a gas in summer. In the thin air surrounding the Gale Crater, Curiosity’s measurements were able to read tiny amounts of inert argon and nitrogen periodically rising and falling as expected, due to this seasonal cycling of carbon dioxide.

This discovery suggests that an unknown source is making or unleashing stores of oxygen in the warmer months and trapping it during frigid ones. NASA scientist’s question if it could be geological, chemical, atmospheric or, perhaps even a biological process. The best guess is that it appears to be a localized event that could certainly be a regional or a global peculiarity.

The consensus is that there is not enough known about Mar’s planetary chemistry to solve this mystery. Specifically, how gases are transported above and within the planet, and what sources they may have—remains deeply uncertain.

NASA scientists believe events in Mars’ past could have conspired to lock away vast amounts of oxygen below ground, which is now, for some reason, surging back into the atmosphere.

This oxygen mystery is reminiscent of the presence of methane on Mars that recently surfaced. Although Martian air contains a persistent low background level of methane, for years multiple independent groups of scientists have claimed detections of dramatic, unpredictable spikes in the gas’ atmospheric abundance. Curiosity spotted one such spike in 2013, and another substantially greater one in 2019. Puzzlingly, many ground-based methane detections have not been corroborated by atmosphere-probing spacecraft high above the Martian surface, including ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter and Mars Express.

Underscoring these recent developments, an Ohio scientist claims to have found photographic proof of "insect and reptile-like" life on Mars. William Romoser, a professor who specializes in arbovirology (the study of viruses transmitted by arthropods) and entomology at Ohio University, has compiled photographs from NASA Mars rovers that he says are evidence of life on Mars. "There has been and still is life on Mars," Romoser said in a statement.

Romoser's detractors claim his evidence for this alleged Martian life comes only from his interpretation of these photographs. As he asserts in the findings he presented on Nov 19, 2019, at the national meeting of the Entomological Society of America, the images show the shapes of life-forms that look similar to reptiles and bee-like insects.

This mosaic taken at the rover’s landing site in the Gale Crater was created by using 27 images from its mast-mounted Left Navigation Camera.

Looking at Curiosity's landing site in color reveals the gravelly area surface of the Gale Crater. The terrain falls off into a depression and beyond that is the boulder-strewn, red-brown rim of a moderately-sized impact crater. Farther off in the distance, there are dark dunes and then the layered rock at the base of Mount Sharp.

This image from the Mars Hand Lens Imager camera shows a small bright object on the ground beside the rover. The object is about half an inch long and the rover team believes this object to be debris from the spacecraft, possibly from the events of landing on Mars.

This is the "Shaler" outcrop taken during the 120th day of Curiosity's mission. Its dramatically layering patterns suggested evidence of past streamflow in some locations.

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